Today, a huge amount of image and video, especially aerial videos (videos captured from aerial platforms), are collected daily. Although these videos are stored, they are seldom re-used because of the difficulty of retrieving relevant visual information from videos collected for other purposes. Currently, when a user must use these videos to extract information, since the user has no control of how the video was collected, the user has to watch the video, all of them, to pick out what he/she needs. This manual searching, filtering and selection process is extremely labor intensive and it can not meet the needs of handling the volume, velocity of both existing and future data collection capabilities.
Although there are some initial attempts to provide computer-assisted video retrieval by filtering the metadata associated with a video sequence, these attempts only provide filtering capabilities based on location (latitude and longitude) and time. In addition, these approaches only retrieve clips of the original videos as how they are collected. There is no re-organization of the visual information, such as video frames, according to the current mission objective.
Thus, there is need in the art to provide to provide a system and method that provides an image analyst with full-control of the video images, including the ability to retrieve and reorganize information from an existing video database of images.